TEACHING MODAL ANALYSIS: A CHALLENGE USING VIRTUAL LABS AND EXPERIMENTAL TECHNIQUES

This work is part of a Project of Innovation and Educational Enhancement for Aerospace Engineering (Bachelor and Master Degrees in the School of Design Engineering of Polytechnic University of Valencia). These studies are only 10 years old and, in these initial stages, a solid and long-term docent project should be consolidated. The objective is to guarantee a good training and learning process both in specific and transversal skills in order to the best professional competence of our students. To this end, we have formed a group of professors convinced of the benefits of using real experiences to the development of certain transversal skills.

Modal analysis can be defined as the field of mechanics devoted to the extraction of the so called modal paramaters, that is, mode shapes and natural frequencies of vibrating structures. The study of this subject implies for students to update their knowledge on some previous courses, as for instance, mechanics, vibrations and strength of materials. Modal analysis is included as a subpart of the subject “Flight Loads. Static and Dynamic Tests in Aircrafts” (Master Degree). As professors we are especially worried on learning process of students and we always try to encourage the students for acquiring skills and competences putting in practice by their selves the theoretical concepts.

In this work we propose teaching this specific field using practices, focused on modelling and experimental techniques. Our main objective is the development of the acquisition of transversal and specific skills for students. The experimental practices are organized in three stages:
(1) Setup and design of the experiment,
(2) Data acquisition,
(3) Interpretation of results and reporting.

Different transversal skills will be come into play: In the initial part of the experiments, students should be able to design and project the setup of the experiment, something that can be included for getting the skills related to “design and project”. In the second stage students can work the skill “specific instrumentation”, related to the ability to use techniques and tools necessary for the practice of the profession. In the third stage, students must read the experimental results and be able to predict them from the physical principles studied during the modelling sessions, where we propose to use virtual labs specially developed for these course. We propose also different assessment forms according to a continuous process of skills acquisition. At the end of the experimental activities, students must present a technical report describing the process